Multitasking?
Hi everyone
Here is my question/problem. I have an old design that would display a message on a 10 character 16 segment (14 + dp and com) VFD Display. In a nut shell, my little pic had a custom font loaded into eprom memory, and there were set messages I would send out to a 32 bit shift register for controling the VFD (I used 14 bits for the segment data, and 10 bits for the grid data, the rest were ignored).
Anyway, At the time if I recall correctly, It took just about every ounce of speed for the pic to display the data without the display looking too dim. What I want to do is re-write my program so that it no longer gets data from pre-writen code but can be sent a serial string from another pic and display it. My only concern is with the amount of time it would take to grab the incoming data from the serial input, it would mess up the display timming. With the other two obvious solutions asside (one being use a chip similar to MAX6850, which is kind of complicated or the second being write code in assembly which is just a little over my head for the moment), is there any other way to make sure I can eat up serial data as fast as I can puke it back out? dont need a full blown solution, just a few ideas. The best solution would be to simply find the correct VFD display with all the hardware already built in and comunicate with it serially, but I cant seem to find the display. If anyone knows of one, I need one almost physicaly identical to a noritake AH1081B. Its a 14 segment (plus decimal and comma so actually 16 segment), 10 characters, one line. I beleive .35" high.
Bookmarks